‘The difficult bit? All of it’
Ducati’s e-mobility boss reveals why Motogp is easy compared with building a new electric race bike…
‘A lot of systems are the same as a conventional bike’
For 16 years Roberto Canè was in charge of the electronics in all Ducati’s Motogp bikes, so he knows a thing or two about tricky projects. But when he became the company’s head of electric vehicles and was instructed to develop a new Motoe bike, he had no idea how tough it would be.
‘The most challenging part? Honestly, all of it,’ he tells Bike. ‘This project was incredibly difficult. I was involved at the beginning of the Motogp era – I joined Ducati Corse in 2002 and the Motogp project was one of the hardest challenges I had ever worked on. But this was harder. At the beginning I thought it was impossible to reach the results we wanted.’
The targets were set by Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicalli in 2020, who had negotiated that Ducati would supply all the Motoe bikes in the Motogp support series in 2023, taking over from Energica. He told Roberto the first track test should happen by the end of 2021. ‘On December 16 that year we were at Misano with a running bike that Pirro [Michele Pirro, Ducati’s Motogp test rider] rode. That is something I will never forget.’ Agreeing with Triumph’s Steve Sargent (see page 10), Roberto says the hardest part of the design is the battery. ‘It’s all new for Ducati – we’re designing an electric motorcycle from the ground up. But if I had to choose the hardest part, I would say it’s the battery pack. We are still refining it.’ ‘It’s been difficult because we had specific performance requests from Dorna [Motogp owners] and it had to be a certain shape, and it had to be easily reachable [so the Motoe mechanics can access it]. There were so many constraints.
‘For example, the battery case is part of the frame so it has to perform correctly in that role. But the battery also had to have the correct energy content to last seven laps of most circuits, while trying to keep the weight as low as possible. Then there is the issue of cooling. We simulated different cooling systems because we have a strong CFD [computational fluid dynamics] department in Ducati and we found that water cooling was the best one. But we are still working on it.’ Another area Roberto had to consider was safety. In 2019, a fire started by a charging battery destroyed all the Motoe race bikes, and Energica bosses have told Bike that one of their main concerns in the early days was keeping mechanics and marshalls out of the way of high voltage electricity. If a bike becomes live, there’s easily enough energy to kill someone.
‘Yes, this is perhaps the most important driver for the design of the whole bike,’ says Roberto. ‘Especially the battery pack – we tested lots of systems to prevent fire and to keep the rider and marshalls safe when they touched the bike. We worked a lot on that. But there are a lot of systems that are the same as a conventional bike – the traction control, slide control, wheelie etc are exactly the same as the ones we developed for Motogp. In fact, our Motoe bike is more similar to a Motogp machine than a production bike.
‘I have not ridden it yet, but our CEO Claudio Domenicalli has. He was impressed. Of course it’s not a Panigale V4S because it lacks power and is a bit heavier. But he said it was easy to ride, despite it being heavier than most race bikes.’